Photography Roundup - 3/03

Weekly News and Photography Updates

March has arrived. Here in northern California, it arrived like a bear bringing temperatures as low as 60 degrees, light cloud cover, and a gentle breeze. San Franciscans had to wear their fleeces all over the city, not just in the Sunset. Fortunately, this cold blast came just in time for the Moonscape voting. Find out in this installment where to cast your votes for some of the most dynamic, interesting, creative, and contest-worthy images we've seen in a Pentax Forums contest.

Pentax Forums Photo Contests

The beginning of any month is a busy time when it comes to photo contests, since our new monthly theme is posted and we need to start picking the previous month's winners.

February Moonscape Contest Nominations

Any ER nurse will tell you that the moon brings out the weirdos— except at Pentax Forums where the moon brought out our strongest, best photographers. Check out some of the amazing moonscapes and nominate your favorites here!

Official Month Contest Theme: Mirror Image

Next month's theme is bad news, if you're a vampire. The Mirror Image theme, for the rest of us, has a lot of potential for great images with thoughtful content, technical excellence, and interesting imagery.

"NO Post Processing" Challenge

Ever taken a photo that you didn't need to edit? Ever thought about challenging yourself that way? Well, if so or if not, we have a thread dedicated to people posting un-edited photos. No post work is allowed at all. Check out other entries and contribute here.

Featured Deals

March is time for camera retailers to do some stock room spring cleaning. Here are the key deals we're watching this week.

Gear News

With CP+ 2015 in the history books, not much in the way of gear news has been released lately. We're watching, hopeful, however, that more lenses will be released in Pentax K mount now that there's a full frame coming.

Photography News

Pentax Loses Japanese Market Share in 2015, Edges out Sony

In 2012, Pentax had 7.5% of the Japanese DSLR market share. In 2013, Sony edged them out of the third-place slot with their DSLR lineup. Pentax regained the third-place position in 2014 with a 5.2% market share. In 2015, they will have a 4.5% market share. Though Ricoh remains in third place, the third-place share of the pie has shrunk by 3% -- about 66% of the overall volume.

On the surface, that should seem worrisome -- Ricoh has 66% of the market than they had just three years ago. However, the numbers about merket share are only for Japan and do not indicate overall sales volume. Numbers like this can be easily skewed by market growth.

There's no doubt that Pentax needs to grow its market share. The new full frame body will, hopefully, help spur market growth in Japan as well as worldwide. Also, the new lineup of high-end lenses will, hopefully, spur growth. The full frame body fills a gap for Pentax and helps provide an upgrade path from APS-C to full frame to medium format.

Hopefully, Ricoh will increase Pentax DSLR body availability and revision their approach to marketing. Otherwise, Pentax will always be a distant third struggling to maintain a baseline of market share.

Safety First!

No shot is worth dying for. No shot is even worth getting a broken collar bone for. Just the other week an unnamed photographer going for an up-close shot of a horse race finale stepped onto the track and in front of a race horse. He survived with a collar bone fracture, but the injury could have been significantly worse. Here's the original article. The accident happens at about 3:10 in the video.

Be mindful of your surroundings. Fortunately, our photographer was not at a Formula 1 event, rally, or taking train photographs.

The Atlas of Beauty

Photographer Mihael Noroc has been traveling the world photographing women for her project The Atlas of Beauty. Her work, I think, shows that all people are all basically the same. We look, feel, and want alike. Photography, more than any art form, provides people with an ability to communicate the commonalities of mankind in an immediate and visceral manner. Noroc's work shows great technical skill, superb artistic vision, and it is worth checking out and, if you can, supporting.

Featured Online Photography Resource

In this installment, we feature Digital Truth, the website most well known for their Massive Development Chart. But Digital Truth provides photographers with much more. If you've never poked around their site, they also have databases for product information (including links to manufacturer technical data), a significant library of guides and tutorial articles and videos, and a database of film chemistry formulae.

If you'd like to support Digital Truth, their Massive Development Chart app is the most useful smartphone app available for film photographers. The app is well designed, user friendly, and contains every tool a darkroom user could need. It's not cheap, but it's an amazing value.

Featured Photography Journal

Aksgar specializes in narrative photography -- photographs that accompany written narratives. Their work is characterized by exceptional photography, compelling narratives, and a keen social conscience that moves, like currents in an ocean, through all their pieces. They post infrequently and irregularly (in fact, they've been quiet for two months.) That said, when they have a new article, it is of exceptional quality.

Specializes in: Photography and narratives awash in social consciousness, typically from southeast Asia

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About The AuthorK David

David is a professional writer and occasional architectural photographer living and working in the Bay Area, California. His novel, Jackalope Hunting, was published in 2010. Since then, he has... More articles by K David →

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